nature: plants

When I was 5 I was up in a tree with all the other kids in some back yard or other. Most likely a spider bit me or I cut myself on a sharp branch. There wasn't a lot of blood, but added to the pain, it was enough to scare me silly. All I saw was a red leaf as I scrambled down and away from the tree. For many years I was loath to go near any thing with a red leaf. Not long ago I had to weed eat near a bush that had some red leaves and felt a ting of that old fear. And I'm 43 years old.

When I was little I had a nightmare that I was being chased by a walking tree. After I had that dream, I thought that every tree in the entire world was as truely evil as the one that chased me. Every time I saw a tree, I'd be ever so careful not to touch it for fear of it eating me.

I'm not sure why I thought this but I remember realizing that all dafodil flowers spoke Chinese to me and all I had to do was put my ear up to them and listen carefully. I remeber once I did this in the car on my way to my grandparents house for Easter and hearing the dafodil tell me secrets of the world in "Chinese" and I understood everything the dafodil told me. FYI- I am not Chinese, nor have I even spoken/learned Chinese.

I was told that in order to make a toothpick, they had to chop down and use an entire tree. One tree = one toothpick. I couldn't figure out how anyone could be that wasteful.

When I was little, I though that some cactuses were soft because of the white fuzzy effect made by the many spines on the plant, I believed this until one day I decided to pet it.

I used to believe that when me and my friends used to go hop-picking (the stuff you make beer out of) every september when we was little, we would dare each other to go sixteen steps down the row.
But no-one ever did sixteen, because legend has it, that the hop ghost would get you when you reached sixteen steps and you would never come back

That legend has gone on for centeries (sp?) and no-one is brave enough to do sixteen.

My grandparents had a pond in their backyard and I used to spend a lot of time by it studying the plants and wildlife. There was one plant that I discovered when you peeled its stem inside it looked like the fruit of a banana. It was small so I thought they were 'fish bananas.' I would peel them and break up the 'fish bananas' and throw them in the pond to feed the fish. I told my family, but they never corrected me...I guess they thought it was cute. I have no idea what that plant was.

Living in a rural village as a small child, on our walk to school there were lots of flowers and plants, but I was particularly fascinated by the thistles. My mum (bless her - as a joke) informed me that they were hedgehog eggs not thinking that I would actually believe her......

when i was about 7 i read a book about these people who walked through a rhodedendren bushes (sorry if thats spelt wrong!!) and never came back out again because they found a different world in there. For years i was terrified of rhodedendren bushes thinking that i would be sucked into them and forced to live in another world!! i would like to meet the person who wrote that book!!

When my daughter was in kindergarten, one of her little classmates pointed out the berries on a juniper bush and informed us, "Those are caterpillar eggs."

I used to believe photosynthesis had something to do with pictures. Heh.

I thought that if you held a buttercup to your face and it only reflected on your chin softly, it meant you only liked butter a little bit.

My sisters told me that spaghetti grew on trees. The also showed me a picture from the encyclopedia of a "matchbook tree." They explained that the small, fruit-like objects (which were really plums)were picked and each was individually whittled down to make a perfect little red match.

We used to drive by wheat fields on road trips...except that I thought it was all pasta...spaghetti noodles to be specific.

All flowers had exactly five petals and two leaves.

I used to believe that every seed would grow where ever it was planted. One day I swallowed a dandelion seed and for months I was waiting until it came sprouting out of my mouth, which then I thought it would kill me because I also believed that the white stuff inside dandelions was poison. So I waited for months and months for my "death" which I knew was going to come. I lived with this fear for about a year until I realized that the dandelion seed wouldn" grow in my stomach.